


The Distance Between Them

by mystivy



Category: Tennis RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-28
Updated: 2013-06-28
Packaged: 2017-12-16 11:25:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/861461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystivy/pseuds/mystivy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after Roger’s second round loss at Wimbledon, following Rafa’s first round exit.   After he leaves Wimbledon, Roger goes to see Rafa in Mallorca.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Distance Between Them

He wakes up suddenly with pressure in his ears and he stretches his mouth to pop them. “We’re landing already?” he says to Mirka. She’s sitting opposite him with Myla on her lap, curled up in sleep, unbothered by the change in pressure. Some way towards the cockpit, Charlene is tucked in beside his mother, who is turning the page of a novel very gently so as not to wake her. He can hear his father’s gentle snore from somewhere behind him. The late evening sun slants into the cabin and catches Roger’s eyes.

“We’re not in Dubai,” says Mirka. “We’re making a stop.”

Roger looks out the window. “Where?” he says. The sea below is spread out like hammered lapis in the sunset.

“Palma,” says Mirka.

Roger feels his muscles tense, though he is worn tired. “What?” he says.

“Palma,” she says again. “Mallorca. We’ll go on to Dubai. You can follow us when you’re ready.”

The arrangement has been in place for many years, but it is usually unspoken; he catches her eye, she holds his gaze for a minute and looks away, and then if he is gone for a few hours it is understood. Only once before did she actually mention it, one summer between Wimbledon and Montréal, when she said she’d visit her parents for a week and if he wanted to spend a couple of days in Mallorca, he should do that. He had stumbled over some vague reply but two days later, thirty minutes after she left for a commercial flight out of Abu Dhabi, he was on his way to the jet.

“It’s okay, Roger,” she says. “Don’t you think we can talk about it after all this time?”

He feels numb, as if these moments are somehow unreal. A fragile, brittle wall they had been carefully ignoring has crumbled at last. “I don’t know,” he says.

She smoothes Myla’s hair and presses a kiss to the top of her head. “Things are different now from how they used to be,” she says. “We have daughters. They’re growing up. You won’t be on the tour forever, and who knows about Rafa?”

“Don’t,” he says.

“Come on,” she replies. “If it keeps up like this, we just don’t know.”

Roger can’t think about that. He sighs and puts his head in his hands, elbows on his knees. “Just…” he says. “Just don’t say it.

“You need to go talk to him,” she says. “Find him on his boat. I’m sure he’s already fishing.” She laughs a little.

He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. It’s all he’s wanted to do, if he’s honest, since he watched Rafa walk off court. “Okay,” he says, quietly.

When he looks up at her, he sees it, just a faint flicker of sadness. He almost changes his mind, he almost tells her it can wait, but then he recalls Rafa’s face as he walked to the net, the unbearable calm of his endurance. He thinks of the comfort he needs himself.

“Is he expecting me?” he asks.

She shakes her head. “You should let him know. There’ll be a car at the airport to take you to wherever he is. He was in Barcelona last night but I’m betting he’s back in Mallorca today.”

“How do you know he was in Barcelona?” says Roger, fishing his phone out of his pocket.

“There were photos online,” says Mirka.

He doesn’t ask why she might have looked for them. He thumbs his phone on. “ _Hey Raf_ ,” he types. “ _Where are you? I’m landing in Palma in 20mins._ ”

It’s only a moment before a reply comes. “ _!!! Porto Cristo – you have a car to bring you?_ ”

Roger smiles. “ _Yeah – see you soon. :-)_ ”

It feels absurd to kiss his wife and daughters goodbye, to say goodbye to his parents, and to leave the plane at Palma. He feels exposed, as if they are witnessing something too intimate. Though the reason for his departure remains unspoken, it is heavy in the air. His father hugs him and his mother squeezes his hand. They taxi to a stop on the private runway and there’s a car waiting for him on the tarmac. The driver gives him a discreet nod and takes his bags. Roger turns to wave a final goodbye to Charlene and Myla in the windows of the jet, and then he slides into the rear seat of the car. He wonders, as the it pulls away, when they will have to start explaining his absences to the girls. He wonders for the thousandth time since they were born if this should be the last time.

The road to Porto Cristo winds through the mountains and down towards the sea. They cut through the outskirts of Manacor, its dim, shuttered apartment buildings and neon-lit convenience stores flickering by as they drive. It’s so dark as they approach the coast that the sea is only identifiable as a black stretch of nothing against the lights of Porto Cristo. They make their way through quiet streets, broad and tree-lined, until they come to a stop outside a low villa right by the shore.

The house is low and private and the gates are locked, though a murmured word into a speaker opens them and the driver continues inside. Yellow light splashes across flagstones as the door is flung open.

“Roger,” he hears, as he opens the car door.

“Hey, Rafa,” he replies. He breathes in the warm sea air and smiles and they both wait like that, as if suspended in time, until the driver has left his bags inside the door and vanished back into the street. “Oh my god, Rafa,” says Roger, as they finally throw themselves at each other, meeting in a fierce hug.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” said Rafa. “I had to tell everyone to go home. They were trying to cheer me up.” He pushes Roger inside and then goes ahead of him, taking his hand. He leads him down a cool corridor and into a spacious living room with large windows. During the day, the windows would afford a view out across the sea, but now the black panes reveal to Roger his reflection and Rafa’s, and beyond them the curve of dim, golden light that sweeps around the bay. The room is scattered with half empty bottles, slices of lime shoved down the necks and now floating uselessly in stale beer.

“Sorry for breaking up the party,” says Roger.

Rafa looks at him with a raised eyebrow. “You think I care about the party?” he asks, in a low voice. He pulls Roger close and puts his arms around him, pressing his face into Roger’s neck, into the curve beneath his jaw. Roger holds him there, one hand on his back and one in his hair, breathing in the familiar smell of him, feeling Rafa’s lean and beautiful body against his own.

They don’t commiserate about each other’s losses. They speak instead with lips and hands and skin. Roger feels himself come alive, like some half-parched plant that finally feels the rain. They grin at each other as Rafa takes Roger’s hand again and leads him up the stairs. Rafa’s bedroom is in darkness and here there is no reflection, just the vast sweep of nothingness out to the dim horizon.

They fall into Rafa’s unmade bed and Rafa just holds him there, fully clothed, kissing him deeply, then kissing his jaw and his neck and pulling back his collar to kiss his shoulder. “I miss this all the time,” he says, peeling up the hem of Roger’s shirt and removing it. He sits astride Roger’s hips and spreads his hands across his chest. The low light that seeps in from the outside catches on his soft features and his eyes gleam in deep shadow.

“I always miss you, too,” says Roger, running his hands up the length of Rafa’s arms. He tugs uselessly at Rafa’s shirt and Rafa understands. He pulls it over his head and tosses it across the room. “I think about you so much, you know. Probably too much.”

“What’s too much?” says Rafa, teasing. “When you’re training?” He leans down low and presses a kiss just beneath Roger’s jaw. It makes Roger’s breath catch. “When you’re at home?” He moves to Roger’s chest, chasing his tongue around one nipple, then the other. “When you’re…” He leans over Roger’s mouth, his lips not quite touching. “With her?”

“Oh god, Rafa,” says Roger in a rough whisper as he surges upwards and turns them over, kissing him desperately. His fingers work on Rafa’s shorts and push them down, and then his own until they’re naked and already moving against each other, just a little, just enough for now. “You can’t ask me that.”

“I think about you when I am with Mary,” says Rafa. He spreads open his legs and Roger slips between them, his cock full and hard and pressing between the tops of Rafa’s thighs. “I think about your body,” continues Rafa. “I think about you fucking me.” He lifts his heels from the mattress and angles his hips up, an invitation.

Roger is braced on his elbows and he bows his head, pressing his forehead against Rafa’s chest. “Stop,” he says, and it comes out a little broken.

“I want you to fuck me,” says Rafa. He reaches into the drawer by the bedside and scrabbles around till he finds the lube and a condom.

“Oh god,” says Roger again, picturing it in his mind, picturing Rafa with Xisca and thinking of him. “I do think of you,” he says, suddenly, the words coming out of him before he had even thought them. “I do.” The confession surges through him like a wave. He takes the lube and pushes his fingers inside Rafa, slow and easy, and Rafa whimpers beneath him.

“Come on,” he says, after just a few moments. “Enough.”

So Roger rolls on the condom and pushes inside.

It’s slow at first as they find their rhythm. Rafa’s eyes are screwed shut and his head is thrown back with abandon. The sounds he makes drive Roger crazy, the sounds of desperation at first, rising to what sound like cries of surprise. And maybe it is always a surprise, thinks Roger, how good this feels, how alive he feels when he’s fucking Rafa, when he’s making his body sing. For years now they’ve come together like this in secret, since the first shy knock on Roger’s door from a boy, hardly twenty-two years old, who had obviously been watching to see when he would be alone. He can’t precisely remember when he first realised that Mirka knew. It was more like a slow dawning than a sudden realisation. He thought at first she really didn’t mind it, that she liked it, even, that maybe when she thought about them she found the idea hot. But in the last few years he had seen the weariness grow in her eyes when she knew he was about to disappear and he saw the faint traces of hurt that she tried to conceal when he returned.

And still he leaves her. He leaves her for his island boy, now become a man, who strains against him with the strength of his fierce body and who kisses him with a hungry, open mouth. And more than all that, who is always on his mind and buried deep somewhere in his chest. He feels that over the years he has taken some part of Rafa inside himself, some part of his heart or his soul or his being, and so he spends his days in taut awareness of the distance between them. They crash together with relief at times like this, when they are as close as they can possibly be. He pushes harder, deeper, as if he is unsure that he is as indelibly imprinted on Rafa’s soul as Rafa is on his, though he knows, deep down, that they are equally entangled. He knows as he pushes home over and over, as Rafa’s voice fills the room, that he always comes back here because this is where he belongs.

“Oh, please, Rogi,” says Rafa, and Roger closes his hand around Rafa’s cock. With just two or three strokes Rafa’s body arches tightly and his mouth drops open, silent, as he comes hard. Roger rides the waves of Rafa’s orgasm, feeling it deep inside him, and follows him into that moment of oblivious bliss, before he falls, spent, into Rafa’s arms.

He slides out gently and ties off the condom, dropping it somewhere over the edge of the bed, before collapsing again. It is all they can do to breathe, for a while, until their minds clear and they laugh a little and Rafa stretches and says, “So good,” before pressing a kiss against Roger’s cheek.

“So messy,” says Roger, grinning, as he pushes himself up to kneel between Rafa’s legs.

“I don’t care,” says Rafa. He reaches out and turns on the lamp beside the bed. They both squint in the sudden light. Roger feels laughter bubbling in his chest and Rafa must, too, because they are both grinning and sighing. 

“Come on,” says Roger. “We’ve got to clean up.” He drags Rafa to the bathroom where they turn on the shower and wash with a flannel. Once they’re dry, they crawl back to bed, and Rafa turns the light off again. They sleep entangled in each other’s arms.

 

The day is bright before they wake. Roger wakes slowly, emerging from warm, comforting dreams to the sweaty heat of Rafa’s bed. He is hungry but he does not want to move, not while Rafa is still asleep against his shoulder, an arm thrown over his chest. But he does move, eventually. He slides out from Rafa’s arms and wanders downstairs, where his bags are still placed neatly just inside the door. He carries them to the living room and finds some shorts and a shirt.

He’s got coffee brewing and bagels toasting by the time Rafa appears, still rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Morning, sunshine,” he says, and Rafa smiles.

“Morning.”

Outside the sea is a shimmering turquoise under a blue sky. There are palm trees planted in Rafa’s garden, and a sandy path leads between them down to the beach. Gulls are gathering over the water, chattering and diving at something Roger cannot see.

“Hungry?” he asks Rafa, fishing the bagels out of the toaster while trying not to burn his fingers.

“Starving,” says Rafa.

Roger puts the bagels on a plate and finds a jar of Nutella in the fridge. He hands Rafa a knife.

“How long will you stay?” asks Rafa, as they sit opposite each other across the breakfast bar.

“A few days,” says Roger. He’s drinking coffee and Rafa has opted for juice. “Are you training? What’s your schedule?”

Rafa shrugs. “Some training, yes. Oh, I will text Toni.” He gets up to hunt around the living room for his phone and then punches some buttons. “I should call, I think, because Toni always lose his glasses. ‘I can’t read texts, Rafael,’ he says to me.” Rafa shakes his head. “I think this morning I don’t care.”

“Are you training today?”

“No,” says Rafa. “This is what I say to Toni. Day off. Good for the knee, anyway.” He still has strapping on, fraying a little at the edges, stark and white against his skin. 

He puts his phone down on the countertop. “You want to hit tomorrow?” he says. “I have a court over there.” He points beyond the palm trees and Roger can see the top of the wire fencing.

“Sure,” says Roger. “We can play our quarterfinal, huh?”

Rafa laughs and shakes his head. “I think you will beat me if we play that,” he says.

“Then we’re definitely doing it,” says Roger. He grins across the breakfast bar.

Rafa’s phone rings. He sighs, exasperated. “It’s Toni,” he says. “He will say he could not read the text.” He stands up and answers it out in the living room. He speaks in rapid Mallorquín, but Roger can still make out his name.

“Does he know about us?” he asks, when Rafa sits back down.

Rafa shrugs. “I don’t know how much,” he says. “But I think he knows. I tell him that you are here and he is quiet for too long, I think.”

“What about Xisca?”

“Oh, Mary,” says Rafa. “Yes, she knows. She is not…” He searches for the words. “Mary knows that someday this is over between me and her. Is good for now, and we are good friends, no? We are best friends. But it’s not real. Not all the time, anyway.”

“But you sleep together?”

“Sure,” Rafa shrugs again. “Sometimes.” He chews his bagel. “You sleep with Mirka, no?”

Roger is surprised at the question. “Of course,” he says. “She’s my wife.”

Rafa is silent for a moment, contemplative. “You know what I think, Roger?” he says then, licking Nutella from his thumb.

“What?”

“I think someday she will not be your wife. I think someday you and me, we will be together. When tennis is over, when we are old men. We will be together.” He talks as if he’s laying down a manifesto, one he’s thought about for some time.

Roger places his empty coffee cup on the countertop. “You think so?” he says.

Rafa nods. “Yes,” he says.

Maybe Roger can imagine it, every morning like this, blue and balmy, every morning waking up beside Rafa and making breakfast and sitting opposite each other in a white-tiled kitchen that smells of coffee and Nutella. He can imagine other things, too, like travelling together to Paris or London when the Grand Slams are on, or taking Rafa to New York Fashion Week before they head to Flushing Meadows as two champions of yesteryear to watch the new guys on the tour. He imagines showing Rafa how to ski back home in Switzerland and Rafa taking him to Spanish golf courses to teach him how to swing a club.

“You know that’s years from now,” is all he says.

“Not so many years, I think,” says Rafa. “Not so long.”

“You’ll wait for me?” says Roger, aware that he is dangerously close to a promise.

Rafa smiles gently and reaches across the countertop to take Roger’s hand. “I wait ten years or twenty if that’s how long you take,” he says. Roger’s fingers tighten around Rafa’s and in the silence of the moment it occurs to him that these are their smooth hands, the hands without callouses from the grip of the racket. “But you know,” continues Rafa after a moment, “this is not for today, no?”

“No?” says Roger. “What’s for today, then?”

“Fishing,” says Rafa. He disentangles his fingers and stands up to clear the dishes to the sink. “Today is a day for fishing.”

“Okay,” says Roger. “Teach me how to fish.”

“Roger, I tell you a secret,” says Rafa. “I don’t often catch a fish. But it’s a beautiful day, no? We go to the boat. Bring things for swimming. I will drive. We’ll get food on the way.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it all planned,” says Roger.

Rafa pauses in the doorway on his way back upstairs and looks at him over his shoulder. “I do,” he says, and he smiles. Then he’s gone up the stairs and Roger is left alone looking out over the sea. It’s a view he could look at forever.


End file.
